The Beauty of the Rain
by lolathegreat
Summary: House analyzes his relationship or lack thereof with Cameron and angsts about it a bit. Not too terribly melodramatic and full of gooey HC, I promise. Rated T because House sometimes has a dirty mouth.


A/N: Okay, so I'm fairly new to the House fandom, but I've loved the show for a long time. I was listening to my iPod the other day and this story popped into my head due to one of the songs. I know songfics are kind of looked down upon, but I had to put it in there. It just worked so well.

Anyway – the disclaimer is that House (by which I mean the character himself, and the cottages, and Wilson, and Cuddy) does not belong to me (sadly), I'm just borrowing them for a few minutes. The song is "The Beauty of the Rain," by Dar Williams, and is really pretty and sad. It's separated from the text and is italicized. You should all go listen to it.

That about covers it. Enjoy, and if you've the time and inclination, review! Constructive criticism is always welcome.

**The Beauty of the Rain**

**by lolathegreat**

To say the least, it had been a long day. Two days, really.

Gregory House limped through the front lobby, his right hand firmly gripping the handle of his cane, his left an old umbrella. He wondered why he was even bothering with the latter – he had brought the motorcycle to work yesterday morning, when it had been sunny, and no amount of keeping dry on the way to his ride would matter once he started home.

This was one of the many reasons he _hated_ overnight duty.

He rarely was forced to do it, and even when he was, he always managed to get out of it – usually by putting Foreman or Chase (or occasionally Cameron, when she annoyed him enough) in his place. After all, he was a senior doctor here, and he didn't need to be put through something that any underling could (and, for that matter, _should_) be doing. But Cuddy, despite her reputation for being unable to control him, always did find ways to punish him, and this one was her favorite. So last week, when a particularly unpleasant patient's even _more_ unpleasant spouse found himself experiencing unexpected cane-to-head contact (all in the name of unorthodox healthcare, obviously), she made The Cuddy Face at him and he knew _exactly_ what was coming. And he couldn't even try get out of it.

It wasn't even the normal type of loathsome clinic hours, but overnight, on-call-to-any-moron-patient-with-an-emergency-buzzer, you-can-pretty-much-forget-about-sleeping-tonight-you-sorry-bastard -type clinic hours.

House closed his eyes, breathing in the smell of the rain. It had been very dry for the past month, and it seemed like the clouds had been saving up all of their energy for an endurance test in raining. The radio station playing in the third floor doctor's lounge had forecast rain for the next week, and (except for the whole motorcycle issue this afternoon) House didn't mind a bit. The world had seemed thirsty yesterday morning when he'd arrived at the hospital – too bright, too sharp; and today there was nothing but the smell of ozone, the soft spattering sound of raindrops hitting pavement and of cars driving through puddles in the wet street, and the dimmed light that strained to get through heavy gray clouds.

He knew it was cliché and expected of him, but he liked things a little gray. He knew that, by tomorrow, the weather would cause a slight change in pressure that would leave his leg aching more than usual, and he would look back on this brief moment of optimism with disdain, popping a few extra vicodin to keep from smacking another (possibly even more deserving) patient. Still, he had memories of days like this that sometimes made him bitter and, at other times, warmed him slightly. He and Stacy used to stay in on evenings like this. There was something so nice about being all curled up inside the apartment, where it was warm and dry, and looking out into the cold autumn rain, knowing how lucky he was.

_And you know the light is fading all too soon_

House was dead tired. He reached the employee parking lot and waited as a line of cars crossed his path, the rain pattering gently on his umbrella. Even through the sound of the cars going past and the rain on the pavement, he heard her coming. He recognized the sound of her shoes on the ground – stylish yet sensible, he remembered with a very slight smile. Stylish yet sensible.

"Doctor House," Cameron said, by way of greeting, standing and waiting beside him for the line of cars to pass.

House nodded, not looking at her. "Cameron," he said gruffly. The last car passed and the two began walking toward the lot. It was quiet, except for the sounds of rain and traffic.

_You're just two umbrellas one late afternoon_

"So," Cameron said, not at all unexpectedly (she always had to _talk_), "how was overnight clinic duty?"

She sounded obnoxiously cheerful. He turned and almost glared at her, but then he saw that she was smirking slightly, and he rolled his eyes instead. "You know, sometimes all that gets me through the day is the thought that tomorrow the world might end and then none of us will ever have clinic duty again," he said dryly. "Wouldn't that be a joy?" He paused. "Unless hell _does_ exist, in which case it's gotta just be endless nighttime clinic duty, only serving to prove my theory that Cuddy is, in fact, sleeping with Satan."

Cameron laughed that tinkling, fairy-princess laugh of hers that he didn't hear that often, but when he did he always found simultaneously amusing and annoying (amusing because Cameron was such a _girl_, despite her best efforts to make everyone ignore it, and annoying because she was so god damn _cheerful_) "Oh, come on," she said bracingly, still grinning at him from underneath her umbrella. "It can't have been all that bad."

House looked at her with a long face. "I got a call to the ICU at three-thirty this morning because some kid in for surgery woke up, got bored and decided to color with crayons." She raised an eyebrow and he continued, sneering, "He stuck one up his nose and couldn't get it out again, and pushed the emergency buzzer." He watched Cameron's reaction – her eyes sparkled, and she bit her bottom lip.

"Well," she said gently, "he was just a kid…"

"He was twelve," House said scathingly.

"He was in intensive care – "

"Probably because of whatever he shoved up his nose _last_ time. You know," House said, as he reached his motorcycle and Cameron paused with him while he fished his keys from his jacket pocket, "I wouldn't have cared, except because my beeper said 'ICU' I thought it was some sort of emergency. If you're going to be an idiot, do it in the _idiot_ part of the hospital."

Cameron shook her head. House jumbled his keys a bit, finding the motorcycle's, and pulled his helmet off the handlebar it had been hanging on. He turned it right side up and water poured out onto the pavement, splashing onto his already-soaked sneakers. He must have made a face, because Cameron said, "Hmm. Right. Would you like a ride?" gesturing vaguely in the direction of her car.

He thought about it for a moment, weighing his options. Cameron, as apparently everyone and their patient knew, _liked_ him, so that would be awkward. However, he really wasn't looking forward to riding home in this weather without even so much as a raincoat between himself and the elements. Ultimately, the desire to be warm won out over the desire to be alone, and he said, "Yeah, alright."

_  
You don't know the next thing you will say  
This is your favorite kind of day  
It has no walls  
The beauty of the rain  
Is how it falls, how it falls, how it falls_

As she braked at the end of the lot exit ramp, waiting for space in traffic, Cameron turned a dial on the dashboard and warm air spilled from the vents. House gratefully put his hands in front of the vent nearest him, warming up. So far, this had been the right choice – dry, warm, and as of yet without awkwardness.

Cameron turned into traffic, checking her rear-view mirror as she said, "So I'm assuming you got the crayon out…?"

House grimaced. "Well, yeah. I wanted to leave it, though. The kid was crying and having a code-red panic attack over it, and I told him that next time he did something like this I would forbid any doctor in the hospital from removing _whatever_ he stuck into _whichever_ orifice." He shrugged. "The little twerp believed me, I think, which is great. Not only will it save his unfortunate parents some trips to the hospital, but it will also ensure that I'll never have to see the dumb brat again," he said nastily.

"Compassionate," Cameron commented lightly.

"My specialty, as you well know," House replied, in his usual deadpan tone. He stared out the window, watching the gray scenery go past.

Cameron shook her head, turning the windshield wipers up a notch as the rain began to fall harder. They had hit six o'clock rush hour traffic, alternately moving forward and stopping. She smiled, her attention still on the road. "Oh, come on," she said softly. "I think we both know you secretly take _some_ joy in being a doctor. Even when it involves extracting crayons from some dumb kid's nose." She smiled. "You wouldn't be there if you didn't."

He made an exasperated noise. "Cameron, I swear to god, if you don't stop trying to give me the warm-fuzzies I'm going to take a crippled leap from the car and roll into that ditch by the side of the road." He shook his head, tapping the floor of the car with his cane. "I could do it; we're going slowly enough. Maybe I'll land face-down in a puddle. _Then_ how would you feel?"

Cameron snorted, unfazed. She never took his comments seriously. "You're all talk, you know," she said in her obnoxiously matter-of-fact way.

"I'm not even really that," he said darkly.

And then it was quiet for a few minutes. Ah, the inevitable awkwardness.

Cameron was professional enough to keep things from becoming melodramatic, and House was apathetic enough to keep the obvious tension in the air from reaching a breaking point. Still, though, it was always present – not something bad, exactly, but something unresolved that could never really _be_ resolved. Something _uncomfortable_. Because the fact of the matter was, Cameron needed permission to love House, and House wasn't capable of giving that permission to anyone. Even the small, protective part of him that entertained the notion of loving her back was stifled by the other, greater part that vacillated between wholeheartedly still loving Stacy and wholeheartedly hating himself.

He didn't know why that one small Cameron-loving part of him still existed – it was like one sad little match still burning in the dark, waiting to be extinguished. But no matter how hard he blew on it, it only flickered and then held strong. Cameron kept fueling it, he figured. Even though he had flat-out told her it would never happen, she couldn't help but to keep striking the match, hoping one day he'd stop trying to blow it out again.

_And there's nothing wrong but there is something more  
And sometimes you wonder what you love her for _

House didn't really think Cameron loved him. Not in the truest sense of the word, that is. She certainly _thought_ she loved him, but Cameron was a Mender. She had to have a project – a charity case – or she wasn't whole. He hated to deprive her of that, but he couldn't be her latest responsibility. They certainly couldn't be together as they were now – one of them would have to change to fit the other person. House couldn't and wouldn't ever be changed, and as much as Cameron annoyed him, he maintained that her brightness should not ever be darkened by the likes of him.

She thought he was unfair in this regard. In all honesty, he probably was. They both had extreme views of each other – she thought of House as wounded, in need of help, and incapable of love (other than the remnants of his broken love with Stacy, of course), and he thought of Cameron as naïve and painfully optimistic. In actuality, she probably had the more realistic view, but he couldn't help seeing the Cameron caricature in his head, especially when she perpetuated it so often by trying to maintain some semblance of balance with him.

_She says you've known her deepest fears  
'Cause she's shown you a box of stained-glass tears _

She had told him, once, how wrong he was in his assumptions. She had not actually said so, but it was on her face, and he could tell. Unbeknownst to him at the time, it had been on the anniversary of her husband's death. She had held herself together quite well for most of the day, but finally one of his comments had breached the already-fragile shield she had been holding up, and she had simply stood and left the room.

"What's up with her?" Chase had asked dimly, and House, still watching the door that had swung shut behind her, had ordered the two other ducklings to run a few complicated tests together. After they had left, he went and found Cameron.

"What was that?" he had asked her, upon finding her alone in an empty exam room, red-eyed. "Did I finally find an untouchable subject with you?" When she had not responded, merely staring at the wall, he'd said quietly, "Cameron, I have shit to get done today. Either talk to me about it and get back to work, talk to Chase, Foreman or Wilson about it and get back to work, or go the hell home and cry about it there."

She had looked at him incredulously and practically spat out the words: "I cannot _believe_ you sometimes." And her eyes had welled up again, though she caught the tears before they fell, using her sleeve to wipe them away.

House had rolled his eyes, losing patience. What little compassion he'd been feeling toward Cameron was wearing thin. And his leg had really begun to hurt again. "I know," he'd said impatiently. "I can't believe me, either. I'm _unbelievable_. Cuddy says so all the time. It's what I do." He softened somewhat at the deadened look on her face, and sighed. "If I could change for anyone, Cameron, it'd be you," he'd said, somewhat snidely, more to disguise the fact that he was serious than to be unpleasant. "But the truth is, underneath it all, I'm just an asshole."

Cameron, rather than looking shocked, had merely snorted. "_Underneath_ it all?"

And House had smirked, glad that she still had a sense of humor. "Well, yeah, I'm an asshole on the surface, too." (She had said, dryly, "True story…") He had leaned hard on his cane, popping open his vicodin bottle and popping two bitter pills into his mouth. "And then, just beneath the surface," he'd continued, ignoring her glare, "I'm good enough to make you think I can change. But deep down, I'm really still just an asshole."

Cameron had sighed, suddenly brushing herself off, as if shaking off the emotional upheaval from a moment ago. When she spoke again, she had sounded like her usual in-control self. "That's about as close as I'm going to get to an apology, isn't it?" she'd asked, tiredly.

"Yeah, pretty much." He had fidgeted slightly. "What was this all really about, anyway?" And she had looked at him with the broken-Cameron eyes, and he'd done the math. "Ah."

She did, he had to admit now, having known her for over three years, have much more going on under the surface than her stylish-yet-sensible exterior let on. He thought he had her pretty much figured out, but there was a nagging feeling that her need to fix people wasn't all about her dead husband. He had a feeling it went deeper, though not quite deeply enough for her to understand what _he_ went through, every day. It was frustrating, because House liked to know things. He wondered, from time to time, what interesting Cameron facts were hiding from him in her past.

_It can't be all  
The truth about the rain  
Is how it falls, how it falls, how it falls _

He wondered again as he sat in the passenger's seat of her car, the windshield wipers' squeak the only sound.

The traffic had cleared. They were nearly to his apartment. They took a right, sloshing through a particularly deep puddle, and he thought about what he would say when it was time for him to get out of the car. He didn't have any idea, and figured it would be yet another awkward ending to yet another awkward conversation with this pretty girl – this _young woman,_ he reminded himself – who always looked like she was waiting for him to say something more.

House wasn't big on regretting things, so generally he just kept himself from caring too much. He was callous and sarcastic and abrasive, and he didn't care who was hurt by it. Cameron, however, was different. She wasn't fragile, per say, but she was vulnerable when it came to him. He never spared her from his usual nasty comments, but he did try to spare her from being jerked around.

There had been times – moments of weakness – when he'd thought about letting down his guard, just for a few moments. The monster truck not-a-date was the first time. She had tried to give him the opportunity again, several times. She had flat-out asked him if he liked her. The answer had been complicated – a mixture of unpleasant histories, protective self-denial, and moral discomfort with the situation – and to make things less complicated, he had quickly weighed the options of yes and no, and had told her what she needed to hear. No, he had told her. Unrequited. Rejected. Give up.

Then, again, she had asked him to dinner. She had tried to get him to open up, but in spite of her attempts (perhaps because of them), he had found himself incapable of it that evening. He told her what he thought of her, but he kept the discussion away from himself. He could see her frustration with that and closed himself off completely. He had not realized how well she could read him – it was as if she had seen the walls going up in his mind and had realized it was all in vain. He had seen a little bit of her give up that night, and it made his stomach twist a bit, but he knew it was for the best.

No. Unrequited. Rejected. Give up.

But she wouldn't give up. And that small part of him really didn't want her to let it go.

_But when she gave you more to find   
You let her think she'd lost her mind  
And that's all on you _

She knew better than to have deep and serious discussions with him. She had tried, once or twice, and he had always shot down her attempts. When he became uncomfortable, he would always put up the walls and make a nasty comment, and she would sigh in defeat. After getting burned enough times, she had learned to be satisfied with her one little flame and not to try to ignite any more.

But despite his best attempts to push her away with nasty words, with negation, with rejection, she sometimes caught him looking at her and knew about the small part of him that wanted her to keep trying to scale those walls, keep fanning that flame. He must have been driving her crazy; Cameron was hyper-aware of emotion and of human interaction. With all the mixed signals she must have been receiving, it was no wonder he was slowly turning her into a basket case.

_  
Feeling helpless if she asked for help  
Or scared you'd have to change yourself _

She had told him she didn't want him to change for her, that she didn't want him to be anyone but himself around her. He remembered how uncomfortable she had seemed on their one and only date when he'd awkwardly complimented her shoes. She had told him she didn't want him to pretend to be someone else. He couldn't help himself – it was confusing, because Cameron was the only one of his three underlings who could almost always accurately read what was going through his disorganized mind, and he had never felt any desire to be anything _but_ himself around her until that night.

It was as he met her in that nice restaurant, as he saw her dressed so smartly, as he suddenly realized how pretty and how _young_ she was, that he arrived at the uncomfortable realization that he could never be what she needed or deserved. He had tried to match her, and he'd found it not only distasteful but uncomfortable and – even more unpleasantly – _dishonest_. He gave up shortly before she gave him permission to do so, already closing himself off to her.

The car pulled up next to the curb in front of his apartment, and House turned to Cameron, suddenly realizing that, while lost in his thoughts, he hadn't actually come up with something witty to say in lieu of the inevitable awkward goodbye. And with the guarded look she was giving him, it was hard to come up with something on the spot. "Thanks," he managed, and Cameron nodded.

"Sure thing," she said pleasantly. Then: "You owe me one, House."

He stared at her, his right hand already pulling the door handle. "Beg pardon?"

She shrugged. "Sometime you'll have to give _me_ a ride home on the bike." She raised her eyebrows, daring him to argue or make an excuse.

House raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. "Name the day," he said casually, and managed to awkwardly step out of the car and onto the sidewalk. Unfolding the umbrella, he closed the door and she rolled the window down halfway, leaning over to catch his gaze.

"Try not to OD this weekend," she said, brow furrowed in sudden concern. "The forecast says there's a cold front moving through, and seem to get mean whenever that happens." She didn't bother to choose her words carefully; she knew she was right and that he wouldn't be mad at her after she gave him a ride home. And she was right. "If you need anything, or if your leg gives you too much trouble, feel free to give me a call." She paused. "Or Wilson, if that would be less embarrassing. But don't just sit home and pop pills until you pass out."

"Go on and ruin all my fun," he said, rolling his eyes, and Cameron smiled faintly, rolling up her window and pulling out into traffic. He watched until her car disappeared around the corner, and then limped up the steps and into his apartment, closing the door behind him and cranking up the heat. Coffee seemed to be the next logical thing to do, and he set about brewing a pot, collapsing onto the sofa to wait until it was done. The room had warmed considerably, and the shades were open, revealing the dreary evening as what little light had fought its way through the cloud cover began to dim.

_And you can't deny this room will keep you warm  
You can look out of your window at the storm  
But you watch the phone and hope it rings  
You'll take her any way she sings  
Or how she calls_

He had wondered what he would do if she simply showed up at his door. House wasn't one for daydreaming, either, but he wondered just the same. She respected his space (and his rejection of her) enough to have only really done this once before, and after the ensuing drama of her leaving the hospital and the condition upon which she agreed to return, he doubted she'd ever try it again.

More than just that little Cameron-loving part of him wished she would, though, just for curiosity's sake.

He wondered if she'd call to check on him this weekend. She probably wouldn't. At the very most, she'd get Wilson to do it.

The coffee finished brewing. He sat on the sofa with the warm mug between his long-fingered hands, watching the light dim until he could no longer see the rain and could only hear it lashing against the windows.

He hoped she wouldn't give up.

He knew it was better for her to let go, and he knew, deep down, that he _was_ wounded and broken and jaded – all the more reason for him to stay the hell away from her. He wouldn't let himself believe that she actually loved him. He wouldn't admit to the fact that, deep down, he thought there might be some possibility of loving her back, of _letting_ her love him.

_The beauty of the rain  
Is how it falls, how it falls, how it falls _

But it was there, that one little flame, and even on a gray day like this, with the ache in his leg already setting in and the bitter memories of love lost flooding his senses, he sipped his coffee and hoped it would stay, at least for a little while.

_  
How it falls, how it falls, how it falls_


End file.
